Prof. Allain has been chosen as an Engineering at Illinois’ Faculty Entrepreneurial Fellow for the 2016-17 year. He joins the second class of Faculty Entrepreneurial Fellows, a program first of its kind in a U.S. College of Engineering supported by a group of passionate alumni. Fellows focus on bringing their work to the world by developing a technology and testing its commercial potential while working with student teams.

Engineering and business students interested in joining a student team led by Prof. Allain this fall must register for the new innovation entrepreneurship course TE/ENG 401: Developing Breakthrough Projects.

With over 3500 abstracts submitted by the September 30, 2015 deadline, WBC2016 is on track to be the largest scientific gathering of biomaterials scientists ever, and the largest World Biomaterials Congress to-date.

HIDRA, the former WEGA stellarator/tokamak, arrived at Illinois in Nov. 2014 from the Max-Planck-Institut fur Plasmaphysik and has been under assembly for the last 18 months (watch assembly). On Friday April 22, 2016 HIDRA had its first confined plasma at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, event attended by over 100 people including the Dean of Engineering, the Nuclear, Plasma and Radiological Engineering Dept. Head, most of the faculty and numerous alumni visitors. The hard work of Prof. Daniel Andruczyk and many undergraduate and graduate students, as well as help from Illinois Facilities and Services were recognized. The device, in operation since 1975 at various sites with intermittent interruptions, is one of the long-lived fusion experiments and now available for plasma physics and fusion research at Illinois.

Professor Allain was invited to present the talk titled Challenges to a foundational understanding of the plasma-material interface in plasma-burning nuclear fusion reactors in the 2015 – 2016 Nuclear Engineering Colloquium Series at The University of Tennessee this past February, 2016. The complete talk is available for viewing at the following link: View Nuclear Colloquium Presentation Feb 9, 2016

Professor Allain was invited speaker at the II International Seminar on Biomaterials, Biomechanics and Regenerative Medicine at the Universidad de Antioquia in Medellin, Colombia. Professor Allain presented the talk Intelligent Design of Advanced Nanostructured Biointerfaces for Regenerative Medicine Applications and also visited Ruta N Corporation, an institution that is pursuing the consolidation of Medellin as a city of knowledge undertaking the development of a technology district.

Prof. Allain has been recently awarded a $1.1 million Fusion Energy Sciences grant from the U.S. Department of Energy to support his research on plasma-material interactions that involve the first few microns of the material surface. Allain’s research group has been pioneering this work discovering adaptive materials capable of sustaining the far-from-equilibrium conditions found in nuclear thermonuclear reactors. These materials include: nanoporous and mesoporous tungsten composites, extreme-refined doped refractory alloys, and self-healing nanocomposite W-Li pseudo-alloys. Prof. Allain will be working closely with NPRE Prof. James Stubbins, a co-principal investigator on the project, to understand thermo-mechanical properties of these complex materials.